More help for Abby

Missed opportunities

Perhaps I should stop reading Dear Abby. I sense danger. It's gotten to the point that I can't peruse Jeanne Phillips' column without thinking, “Oh, girl! That's not what your mama would have said!” The temptation, of course, is to try to rewrite her every response. I'll indulge that impulse just a little today, but I really should swear off. This week, however, the low-hanging fruit was hanging pretty darn low.

DEAR ABBY: I apparently have a problem communicating with people. I have had conversations with colleagues, managers, friends—even my girlfriend—and have been told my words were too harsh and made them feel defeated. It's at the point where people are afraid before I even open my mouth.

I don't mean to be cruel. I just speak the truth as it comes to me and I don't sugarcoat things. Some folks appreciate my candor, but it's getting in the way of having decent relationships. How do I learn to communicate differently when I'm just being myself? The words flow naturally out of my mouth. Am I a jerk? —UNVARNISHED in Inglewood, CA

DEAR UNVARNISHED: You may be grossly insensitive—or you may have a disorder of some kind. (Forgive my candor.) Because you are having difficulty relating to others and it has become a handicap, you should discuss the problem with a psychologist who can help you to gain the tools for better communication.

Geez, Jeanne. Could you have blown a more perfect straight line? Try this answer on for size:

DEAR UNVARNISHED: Yes, you are a jerk. Stop being yourself. Try shutting up for a change. If “people are afraid” before you even open your mouth, you have clearly demonstrated a complete lack of consideration for the feelings of others. No one needs to hear every thought that crosses your mind. Use some self-discipline and stop the words that “flow naturally” from your mouth when they consist of such boorish statements as, “Damn, you sure are fat!” or “You look like hell. You sick or something?” or “It sure must be a bitch to find out your girlfriend was cheating on you, right?” I'm sure you learned to control your bladder although urine “flows naturally” from it. Try something similar with your words. If necessary, get help.

How's that for candor?

Later in the week we got treated to this exchange:

DEAR ABBY: For the past 10 years or so, at bridal and baby showers I have attended, blank envelopes have been handed to guests upon arrival with instructions to self-address them. This, apparently, saves the gift recipient time having to address envelopes to the gift-givers.

I usually set the envelope aside and don't fill it out, but last week the guest of honor's mother handed me an envelope and pen and stood there until I completed the task.

After spending time and money shopping for and paying for a gift, I feel insulted having to address my own thank-you envelope!

Can you think of an appropriate response when I'm asked to participate in this insulting new party ritual? Or should I stay quiet and accept that most people are ignorant regarding good manners? —INSULTED IN OHIO

DEAR INSULTED: How about this for a response: “After spending my time shopping for a gift, and my hard-earned money to pay for it, it is insulting to be expected to address my own thank-you envelope. If she likes the gift, she can address the envelope herself. If not, she can return the gift to me.”

It's like she's not even trying! Here are some alternatives, beginning with the short, sweet, and obvious one:

DEAR INSULTED: How about “After spending time and money shopping for and paying for a gift, I feel insulted having to address my own thank-you envelope.”

Pauline Phillips would not have been so tone-deaf as to reply to a correspondent with a lame paraphrase of the correspondent's own words. When the writer has already done your work for you, just point it out gently! Simple. And it's less insulting than giving the correspondent's own words a trivial rewrite. Put your stamp of approval on the original and move on.

Perhaps the writer should have approached Miss Manners instead. I imagine Judith Martin would have had a deft suggestion for a subtle response that eschews even a trace of overt rudeness. This is the best I could come up with for Dear Abby working in a Miss Manners vein:

DEAR INSULTED: Thank the mother-in-law effusively for the envelope and pen and tuck them promptly into your handbag. Resume conversation with other nearby guests. If she does not walk away in befuddled defeat and continues to hover over you, say “Oh, dear. Whatever was I thinking? You'll want your pen back, of course.” Give it back to her and perhaps now she'll go away.

The really incorrigible cases will resolutely ignore all the indications that they are being a pest and may even resort to giving you detailed and explicit instructions. Be gracious in your response to this boorishness: “Oh, you wanted me to perform a clerical task now, in the midst of this lovely reception. Please forgive me. It would never have occurred to me that you would be expecting such a thing! Just give me a moment, please.” Retrieve the pen and fill out your address on the envelope, but write “Occupant” in place of your name. If the indomitable mother-in-law notices and retains enough reserves of effrontery to point this out, smile ever-so-cheerfully and say, “Oh, heavens! I would never want to deny the lovely young couple the opportunity to add a nice personal touch of their own!”

Pauline Phillips used to claim that none of her Dear Abby responses were ghost-written. The same may be true of Jeanne Phillips, but the record suggests she should considering staffing up with a wordsmith or two. Anyway, that's my advice.

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A musician and a gentleman

A musical interlude

As you may know, I bestowed my extra ticket to the San Francisco production of Wagner's Ring on the son of long-time friends. “EF” is a recently-declared music-composition major and I got to play the part of a patron of the arts by introducing him to the sui generis landmark of operatic composition. My friend Gene O'Pedia weighed in with a vigorous endorsement: “Neat that it's all in the space of a week, a concentrated dose of Wagner. Could be transformative. Like if EF starts the next school year as an engineering major.”

Good point. The experience could confirm the young student in his career goals or scare him off into some different field entirely. As it happened, the former seems more likely than the latter. An important factor in EF's opera adventure was his opportunity to converse with one of the performers in the orchestra pit.

We arrived at the War Memorial Opera House early enough on the evening of the performance of Die Walküre to catch most of the talk that was scheduled one hour before curtain time. It turned out to be an unfortunately dull affair—a flat and uninflected reading of an analysis “by some great expert for the edification of other great experts”—and I was glad we had missed part of it. However, the talk was presented on the opera house's main floor, so EF and I got a different perspective than the one we normally had from our regular seats in the balcony level. After the talk ground to its eventual end, I led my guest over to the orchestra pit so that he could check out the disposition of musical forces and ogle the conductor's stand.

It was still half an hour before curtain, so there were very few musicians in the pit, but EF was in luck. Although he is studying several instruments, his principal instrument is the cello, and there was a cellist at his post in the orchestra pit. EF promptly leaned over the railing and asked the musician about the cello part for Die Walküre. I was concerned that EF was committing a faux pas by bothering one of the performers, but the cellist seemed not in the least perturbed.

He came up to the rail and informed EF that the cellos had 79 pages of music to get through for that night's performance. He added that Walküre worked the cellos especially hard, having the same number of pages for them to perform as the massive Götterdämmerung, despite being 45 minutes shorter in overall duration. Upon finding out that EF was studying music composition, the cellist gently suggested that his future compositions might give the cellos a break by not emulating Wagner too much.

Although we did not know it at the time, EF's friendly advisor was David Kadarauch, the opera's principal cellist. He took several minutes to chat with EF and was generous in sharing his informed perspective on composition and performance. When he found out that we were sitting in the lower balcony, Kadarauch congratulated us: “I always tell my friends to sit there. It's the best location in the house for appreciating the music.” My young companion soaked it up like a sponge and it started the evening on a high note for him.

I am confident that Mr. Kadarauch does not follow this blog, so he may never see this. However, I feel that I witnessed something significant and praiseworthy. He probably did not think it was a particularly big deal to take a few minutes to encourage a young music student who hung on his every word. He was simply exchanging his performer's hat for a moment for that of a teacher. But it was a big deal. EF may be at the beginning of a long musical career. The kindnesses of those who have gone before him will shape and inform that career. Thank you, David Kadarauch, for giving that career an encouraging and appreciated nudge at its very start.

And I'm pretty sure it won't be in engineering.

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Do you really want this job?

Advice you shouldn't need

I have one of the best jobs in the universe. I'm a college faculty member with seniority and tenure, so my job comes with a high degree of security and a sense of doing something worthwhile. I am fortunate indeed, so I understand that other people might be eager to apply to be my colleague. What I do not understand is why so many of these people do such a bad job of applying. Perhaps it would be better not to describe their mistakes. Folks who do not figure it out on their own are probably not good choices for future colleagues.

On the other hand, teachers can't help teaching and we should not discourage people from learning. Here, therefore, is a brief list of suggestions. You may be struck by how obvious they are. Or should be.

Fill out the application

No, really. Fill it out. Don't leave parts of it blank unless they're really supposed to be blank (like the section where you list the misdemeanors on your rap sheet). Sometimes this mistake is made by adjunct faculty members who are applying for a tenure-track position at the school where they already teach. “Oh, they already know me. I'll just hit the highlights.” Sorry. Get a clue. There will be people on the hiring panel who don't know you—like those from outside the department. It's also likely that the screening rubric will explicitly require the application screeners to evaluate the applications strictly on actual content. (“Do not base your rating of an application on personal knowledge.”) Blank spaces earn no points from the screening committee in deciding who gets an interview.

Don't hide information

This is something of an ancillary to the previous point. Hiring committees typically screen dozens of applications. If you put information where it's not expected, it may not be seen. One recent unsuccessful candidate neglected to indicate that he was bilingual on his application—something that would have fit well in the item related to personal experience with academic and cultural diversity. He buried his knowledge of Spanish in a block of miscellaneous skills in a résumé attached to his application. I found it, but I know others did not. That was probably worth a point that most other screeners didn't give him.

Know your references

I have seen half a dozen candidates in recent years shot down by their letters of recommendation. Don't ask for a letter of recommendation from someone who will damn you with faint praise or—even worse—explain why you aren't ready for a teaching career. Don't ask for recommendations from people who don't have a positive opinion of you. Also, don't submit letters of recommendation from your students. You have too much authority over your students to make their comments entirely credible. If you do have fan letters from students, pass them along to the dean or department chair from whom you will ask for a letter of recommendation.

Rehearse your presentation

So far as I know, every college asks its applicants to give some kind of teaching demonstration. At a university you might conduct a seminar. At a community college you can expect to give a mini-lecture. At my school, interviews typically include a 10- to 15-minute teaching demo. We send out a topic (or short list of topics) for the candidates to prepare. Some ill-advised applicants attempt to squeeze a one-hour lecture into their allotted time, tearing through the material four or five times as fast as they would in class. That's missing the point entirely. We want a representative sample of each candidate's style and skill. The smart candidate will rehearse the presentation a few times to ensure that it flows well and fits the time permitted. I have seen candidates attempt to address their assigned topic off the cuff, with no evident preparation. The results are predictably poor and haphazard. At least two candidates seemed not to remember the exact assignment and needed to be prompted; neither of those candidates advanced to the next round.

It really is all about you

Yes, I know that most of us in the teaching profession are self-sacrificing martyrs who put the interests of others before their own. We're all candidates for sainthood. In an interview for a faculty position, however, you're supposed to persuade us how wonderful you are. During your interview, the focus is indeed on you and on no one else. And here I will make my point: Don't talk about other people. Stay focused on giving the committee a complete picture of your splendid qualifications for the job. Do not try to build yourself up by tearing others down. I have seen more than one instance where a candidate felt it necessary to poor-mouth rival applicants. In one particular case, a part-time faculty member thought that his principal rival for the full-time position was another adjunct instructor. He proceeded to say bad things about his part-time colleagues, building himself up by denigrating their talents. (If only he had known that he was the only part-timer among the finalists.) He didn't get the job.

Don't burn bridges

You might not get hired the first time you apply. I didn't. Neither did most of my colleagues. The rule is try, try again. It is therefore a bad idea to send nastygrams to members of the hiring committee and the college administration when you finish out of the money. It is my understanding that the dean of instruction has a long enough memory to remember that you sent her a letter (“I was clearly the best candidate among the applicants and the person you chose is not worthy to buff my briefcase”) and is likely to bring it up if she ever sees your name on a list of candidates again. Not kidding. This really occurred.

Good luck, future faculty members.

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Why there are so many nuns

And all my students become math teachers!

I miss Pauline. While I still tend to read Dear Abby when I run across it in the pages of a newspaper, the advice seems to be missing the snap and ginger that the original “Abigail Van Buren” brought to the agony-aunt business. Daughter Jeanne may be an example of regression to the mean. She's like Siegfried Wagner to Pauline's Richard.

An item in one of last week's columns reminded me why I feel that way:

DEAR ABBY: My daughter recently told us she is attracted to women. I feel she has been unduly influenced by her mentor/professor at her college, as she quoted this woman several times when she “came out.”

My daughter has always been quiet and shy. She finds it difficult to make eye contact with anyone. How am I to accept this, especially since I feel her mentor took advantage of the situation? I am finding it difficult to function at all. I love my daughter very much. This just hurts. —MOM AT A LOSS IN OREGON

DEAR MOM AT A LOSS: I understand this has been a shock for you, and for that you have my sympathy. It is possible that your daughter has always been quiet and shy because she was wrestling with who she is, so the fact that she told you her feelings is a good thing.

Because you are hurting, it would be helpful for you to talk to other parents of lesbians and gays. They can help you through this period of adjustment. You can find support by contacting PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) by calling (202) 467-8180 or logging onto www.pflag.org. If you do, you'll be better able to support your child.

That's right, Jeanne. Ignore the elephant in the room. The advice to contact PFLAG is good, but you're completely silent about Oregon Mom's idiocy. I'm not suggesting that you should have called her an idiot, but remaining silent gives the appearance of taking her statement at face value.

Which statement? This one, obviously: “I feel she has been unduly influenced by her mentor/professor at her college.” Oregon Mom is telling us that she thinks her daughter's professor turned her gay. And you're just going to leave that lying there on the page for readers to see and fret over? Sure, PFLAG will explain to her that she is full of crap, but the opportunity to address it in the column was missed.

Here's my suggestion for a replacement for the first paragraph of Jeanne's answer. It may be a bit more blunt than what Pauline might have said, but I like to think it's in her spirit:

If your daughter's mentor helped her to recognize her lesbianism, you owe her a debt of gratitude. Now your daughter has a chance to live a less confused life. If you think your daughter was seduced into “the gay lifestyle,” you need to get acquainted with reality.

Then the recommendation to contact PFLAG is a smooth segue. Read the letters a little more closely, Jeanne. You're missing important stuff.

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Halfway there?

It happens this week

My hit-rate on Halfway There has gradually drifted up from last year's fairly steady 200 per day to this year's approximately 300. I'm not certain why the numbers creep upward, but it's fun to see that they do. It intrigues me to think that each day I have readers from around the world. They come from such places as Canberra, Singapore, Cork, Seville, Sydney, Wellington, Stockholm, London, and Fresno, to cite just a few of the exotic locations listed on Sitemeter's roster of recent visitors.

And now I'm approaching 500,000 in total visits to my blog since it was launched in 2005. (If only I had a nickel for each visit!) Given the rate of visits, the milestone will be achieved in the next day or two.

Half a million visits in six years? How long will it take to hit one million?

Addendum

What a let-down! I was looking at the Sitemeter report on visit 499,998 (which was someone from Auckland) and anticipating the arrival of the half-millionth visitor when a sudden surge of hits caused me to miss the tick of the counter to 500,000. It hit 500,002 before I could blink. Damn!

But not to worry, I could check the details to see who it was. And ... drum roll ... bleah. It was just an invasion of googlebots. Visits 499,999, 500,000, 500,001, and 500,002 were all from googlebots in Mountain View. They were visiting the posts titled “Chains of gold,” “Universal Experts,” “The Obama-Heinz Incident,” and “Ten Percent of One Million.” Why? Beats me! I suppose it was all part of Google's “Don't be evil” campaign.

A real person finally showed up as visitor 500,003. Hello there, Lubbock, Texas! What kept you?

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Scholastic solidarity

On the ramparts

I am a math teacher.

I teach in a public school.

I am a union member.

All of these things are good things, at least in my opinion. I realize that some people think otherwise. First of all, math is clearly an unpopular subject, despite its beauty and utility. When you admit to being a math teacher to a stranger, prepare to hear, “Oh, I could never do math” or “Math was my worst subject in school.” You will surely die of asphyxiation if you hold your breath waiting for the first person to say, “Math was my favorite subject!” They are few and far between.

Then there are those people who snidely refer to “government schools” when speaking of public educational institutions, as if they are somehow inherently inferior to private or sectarian schools. Actually, when you allow for our non-selective open-admission policies, we do pretty well. Our best students are as good as any you'll find anywhere else. Our worst have no counterparts at the private schools because they were never allowed in in the first place—but we do the best we can to help them anyway.

And the people who say “government schools” don't seem especially to mind driving on “government roads” or eating “government approved” food or drinking “government filtered” water.

Finally, of course, there's that business about union rapacity and the efforts of union members to destroy our way of life...

Excuse me? What folks so fondly imagine as “our way of life” is a union product. Really!

Look for the union label, idiots!

The forty-hour work week? Paid vacations? Who invented those? Not the robber barons. Not the corporate executives. Civilized work hours and reasonable recreation periods are the result of union efforts and collective bargaining.

Want to go back to the “good old days” before unions? Good luck! Planning to take your kids with you and put them to work to support you? (Those child-labor laws are so restrictive! Five-year-olds used to be really useful in those factories!)

The supposedly liberal mainstream media does a pretty lousy job of covering stories about labor unions and working conditions. Look how supinely they parrot right-wing smears: Why call an upset teacher a “union demonstrator” when you can call her a “union thug”? Why refer to a union executive as a “union leader” when you can tag him as a “union boss”? I once wrote a letter to my local paper to complain about a reference to “union bosses” in what was supposed to be a straightforward news report. Why, I asked, are my elected union officials being described as “bosses,” as if to suggest criminality and racketeering? The newspaper published my letter, but I've never seen any improvement in its coverage.

Sometimes I get snarky comments from acquaintances (seldom from friends, since I avoid making friends with idiots) who whine about the cushy jobs that teachers have. They tend to focus on things like summer vacation (we don't get paid for summer months, you know) and supposedly short hours (as if we're off the clock when our in-class hours are done). They look at a fifteen-unit load and express amazement that we work “only” fifteen hours per week. (Like I said: idiots.) They have no clue at all.

When they tell me I get too much time off, I tell them they get too little. Get a union, I suggest.

Of course, a lot of us still have to work during those summer “vacations” to make ends meet. Perhaps our rapacious union reps didn't extract as many concessions as the uninformed segment of the public thinks. Time to take to the streets again!

---

See more at Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions! Thanks to Steve Lazar for kicking this off.

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Browser bigamy

Double your pleasure

Firefox knows that I am Zeno, remembers all kinds of things about me in its cookies, and enables me to post blog comments under that name with a minimum of difficulty. I can go traipsing through the ScienceBlogs and the Discover blogs and Facebook with my Internet identity firmly established (an on-line identity, by the way, that actually dates back to the pre-Internet era—no kidding!). My browser's memory preserves my preferences and smooths my on-line excursions.

Except when it doesn't. I need my real-life identity when I check into my faculty website or my personal Facebook page (not to be confused with my blogger Facebook page). Before I hit on a convenient solution, I found myself having to log out of various accounts and log into others. It was a minor nuisance. I especially didn't like it when I would be finishing up a post or comment, only to discover upon trying to publish it that I was operating under the wrong handle. (My students really don't need comments from some stranger named Zeno.)

The solution arose rather naturally. My school district has (big surprise!) standardized on Microsoft Office products, so all of our computers default to Internet Explorer. On my campus computer, therefore, I became accustomed to accessing the college's website using IE. When I finally prevailed upon our microcomputer support people to give me installation rights on my own office computer (not a particularly easy task, by the way), I promptly installed Firefox. While beginning to use it to log in to my favorite sites (like the aforementioned ScienceBlogs, for example), I paused to consider whether to use my real-life persona or my blog identity. Soon I realized it was easy to let Firefox be Zeno's browser while retaining IE as the real-life math professor's browser.

I set up a similar configuration at home. These days it's not unusual for me to have two different browser windows simultaneously open on my desktop. Google Reader tracks my favorite blogs in Firefox while IE keeps an eye on my college pages. Depending on which browser I'm using at the moment, I'm either real-life me or Internet me. I am such a power user!

Um. Not really. A genuine power user would configure different personalities within the same browser program and toggle back and forth at need, but I've never taken the time to learn how to do that. This is as much a story of “good enough for now” as it is a story of browser bigamy. It reminds me of the glory days of Lotus 1-2-3 (remember that?). One of the officers of my local computer club revealed that he didn't have a word processing program. He was using the 1-2-3 spreadsheet to do the job. He'd create wide cells, format them as text, enable word-wrapping, and type each paragraph of his document into different cells. He was very proud of himself, even though it sounded like a cumbersome and jury-rigged system. But what the heck. It worked, and he was comfortable with it. My computer-club colleague and I aren't quite Rube Goldbergs, but we have our delusions of adequacy.

Speaking of which, now it's time for me to pop over to my IE window. I just graded an exam and discovered that one of my chronic underachievers didn't bother to show up to take it. Zeno can't drop him from the class roster, but real-life math professor can!

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Chains of gold

Saying it with money

There are people who like to pick up the check. Some insist on it. I presume it's a kind of dominance game to them. See how superior I am? I have lots of money and I am generous! (Bow before me.)

I have often paid the tab for a meal with a friend and sometimes I reach for the bill without even thinking of it. I claim, however, that the habit has developed innocently. While I take turns with many of my friends, others are more routinely my guests. For example, one friend was raising a small child as a single parent. We fell into a routine of my taking them out for a meal each weekend. We all enjoyed the visit (unless the kid acted up, of course) and I could readily afford it. Another friend developed health problems and employment difficulties and began to drop out of a regular lunch group we both attended. To keep his company and restore him to our social circle, I began to treat him. (And others step in when I'm not there; we like him to stick around when he can.) And then there was the case of the penurious grad student, which is a condition many of us might recall.

You get the picture. My “generosity” is an act of enlightened self-interest. It provides me with more opportunities to hang out with good friends who I might otherwise see less often. There's no demeaning noblesse oblige about it at all.

Or is there?

I'm re-examining things and I'm just a little uncomfortable. Am I really as discreet and unobtrusive as I imagine myself to be? Certainly I don't wave cash or a credit card in the air. I don't lunge across the table when the server sets down the bill. I don't play the seigneur.

This examination of conscience is prompted by my brother. Since his older brother (yours truly) “ran away” from home, it has fallen on him to manage our parents' financial matters. No, Mom and Dad aren't incompetent to handle their own affairs (though their rationality is suspect in matters of medicine and politics), but their doughty local son already manages the entire family business and may as well, therefore, take on the relatively minor additional job of looking after their affairs.

And that is why he called me.

“What are you going to do with your check, Zee?”

“I don't know. I guess I could shred it.”

An exasperated pause.

“I would really prefer it if you didn't.”

“Why not? I don't need any money from Mom and Dad. I didn't ask for anything and I don't want anything. Am I supposed to feel beholden?”

My brother doesn't like it when I talk like that.

“Look, Zee. This has nothing to do with your disagreement with Dad, okay? Our folks have an estate plan and it's my job to follow through. Each of us gets a tax-free gift from them each year in a scheduled distribution. It kind of screws things up when you don't deposit your share.”

“I just stashed the thing without cashing it. That's all. I didn't go out of my way to cause anyone any trouble. I just find it somewhat irksome that Dad ignored my request to leave me out of it. Why don't they give more to our kid brother, huh? He's a single parent with young kids now. He could actually use it, right?”

“It doesn't actually work that way. All four kids are getting the same amount according to the estate plan and all you're doing is messing up the calculations. It's your money. You can do whatever you want with it. Give it to our brother, if you want. Do anything. But I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me clear it from the books.”

Hmm. I do rather owe the guy. His presence next door to our parents has relieved me of the standard eldest-son responsibilities. I have no desire to further complicate his life, even if I suspect that our father is dispensing largess at least in part to demonstrate his dominance. He's been a check-grabber all his life, even at dinners where someone else issues the invitations and has acted as host. It's a kind of game with him, demonstrating his overweening generosity. There are worse vices.

Observations such as these have caused me to grow up into a person who suspects that everything comes with strings attached—even (especially?) gifts from Mom and Dad. I'm sure you pity me now. Such problems I have, trying to decide whether to accept lumps of unneeded cash. Such a big favor I would do my brother, cashing the checks he sends out to his siblings.

I pondered the matter. My brother did say I could do whatever I wanted with the unrestricted gifts. No strings? Really? Ideas began to form in my head.

So far in recent weeks I have endowed a new student scholarship and made preliminary arrangements to boost another scholarship endowment to sustainable levels. I sent a few bucks to Roy Edroso of Alicublog and Gary Farber of Amygdala (and perhaps you should, too; thanks, PZ, for bringing their plight to my attention). I've contributed to a few liberal causes and a few liberal politicians. (Barbara Boxer may have never gotten my father's vote, but she got a few of his dollars.) And my baby brother's children are getting better-than-usual presents from their Uncle Zee.

Now if I can only maintain my air of discreet insouciance.

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Identically different

You're not alone

Every semester begins in the same way. Students show up, a bit disoriented, and try to figure our their instructors and their classes. We instructors usually have the advantage of more experience (although some of our students have been here a long time), but we're a little disoriented, too. What will the new crop of students be like?

One thing is all but certain. Some of them will fail.

I know. That sounds like a defeatist attitude. Is the fact that it's true a defense? There are solid reasons why a college instructor cannot realistically expect to shepherd an entire class of forty (or more!) to passing grades at term's end. (Please take it as read that the instructor has actual standards and does not simply hand out C's for “trying.”) I'll enumerate some of them:

Circumstances

In a class of any size, you're going to have students who run afoul of emergencies, whether anticipated or unforeseen. I've had students distracted by health issues (all the way up to and including life-threatening physical conditions or debilitating emotional difficulties), family problems (divorce, custody disputes, offspring with behavioral issues), and legal matters (such as probation violations, lawsuits, restraining orders, evictions, and incarcerations). While some of these circumstances could be mitigated by high-functioning and responsible individuals, many would overwhelm any mere mortal. Severe illness, in particular, is not something easily managed. No one blames a student for not doing well in a class if he or she is simultaneously struggling with a debilitating illness.

Laziness

The lazy student exists. I seem to have a few every semester. They're apparently not quite sure why they're in school, but perhaps it was the path of least resistance. They like to sit in the back row and drowse—or play surreptitiously with their electronic toys. Each semester I fight the temptation to label students as indolent too quickly—their characteristics are often so overt—and instead give a good college try to getting them involved and learning. If they don't snap out of it, they're doomed. But they mostly don't care. At least, not enough.

Uniqueness

Perhaps this one is new to you, but it's a commonplace to me. My struggling students frequently suffer from singular situations—or so they think. No one has ever suffered as they do! It finally occurred to them that I should try to disabuse them of this notion.

Sure, absolutely everyone is unique. Even identical twins (DNA isn't everything). But people are unique in their assemblage of traits and experiences, not in their components. The various traits and experiences, when viewed individually, are part of the common legacy of humanity. In other words, you have more company than you realize.

The poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal said it in a way that impressed me back when I was in graduate school. The original German is not at my fingertips (as if it ever was), but the English sense of it is this:

No matter how embarrassing or isolated your seeming situation, you nonetheless have thousands of companions of whom you are unaware.

Quite right. And thus I try to get my students to understand that they are neither the first nor the last to have a problem with mathematics. Literally millions of other students have had problems with algebra, for example. No professor during office hours or tutor during drop-in assistance periods in the help center is going to recoil at a student's question and say, “Oh, my God! I've never heard that question before! No one has ever had this problem before!”

Been there. Done that. Students and teachers and tutors alike. (Okay, a few of the newer teachers or tutors might have that reaction, but they'll get over it pretty quick.)

You are unique yet the same. No one else has quite your special combination of characteristics, but every part of you is shared with others. Don't fall into the trap of thinking, “No one has ever been this confused before. No one has ever made such mistakes before. No one has ever been this bad at math.”

Plenty have, and they have done so in ways that are both different and the same as your missteps and failings. Many of them have found assistance and solutions that are also as different and as identical as the ones available to you. Go find them and swell the ranks of the successful.

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Of two minds

Reflexive code-switching

Quentin Crisp once gave some encouraging advice about maintaining one's residence: “There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”

I have occupied my current domicile for more than a quarter-century, so I'm well past that initial quadrennium. Unfortunately, I do not have Crisp's strength of character. Once or twice a year I feel compelled to do—or at least try to do—some serious cleaning. The big problem, of course, is the clutter created by my ever-growing collection of books and papers.

At the conclusion of every semester, I feel the pressure of the responsibility to tidy up after myself. Stacks of books need to be picked up from tables and chairs and floors (and any other surface that is at least approximately flat) and shelved (occasionally with some attempt at an organizational rationale). Stacks of papers need to be picked up from those same locales and sorted into the filing cabinets or recycling bins.

The room I call my library is usually an especially grueling undertaking. It has long served as my home's emergency reservoir, its pressure-release valve, a place where random items get shoved out of the way. The shelves of the library's bookcases are packed to overflowing—those shelves that I can see, anyway. The lower ones are obscured by stacks of miscellany. I recently made an effort to cleanse the Augean library.

A funny thing about housework: I sometimes find myself channeling my paternal grandmother, who was always tidy as a pin (whatever that means). Hands on my hips, I'll gaze into the turmoil of the library and say, “Credo! Tal lástima!” Loosely translated, it means, “Can you believe it? What a disaster!” Another good word is porcaria, which means filth and evidently owes something to pigs (porcos).

In this frame of mind, it's easier to get down to work, occasionally muttering Avó’s favorite imprecations to myself under my breath. It's just a little weird, but it's okay. Whatever works. But I noticed something the other day that gave me pause.

I dug my fingers under a stack of old school papers and tugged at it, preparatory to lifting it up and moving it to a desk for sorting. My right hand slipped and I received a sudden and sharp paper cut on my index finger. I cried out involuntarily, but I did not shriek “Ow!” or “Ouch!” What I said—rather loudly—was “Ai!”

I was in Portuguese mode and I used a Portuguese cry of distress. As I sucked on my finger, distressed but bemused, I pondered this curious occurrence. Cries of pain, you know, are reflexive. You don't think about them. You just say them. (Thus a painful mishap could give away an undercover operative in a foreign land.) I tried to remember if this had happened before, but I could not recall for certain. I imagine it was standard operating procedure when I was little and Portuguese was my principal language, but my childhood memories are not that detailed.

In graduate school a few years ago, I learned for the first time about code-switching, the blurring of the boundary lines between languages in the speech of multilingual people. For me, it was just a new name for a phenomenon I had long been familiar with. Sometimes we grind the gears in our language transmission box as we shift among the languages we know. Since English has long been my dominant tongue, I don't experience this as often as I did in my youth, but apparently it's still there. Or, at least, my first language remains so embedded in my nervous system that I can still use some elements of it reflexively. I just need to be in the right mode.

Grandma would be so proud. (But not about the state of my library.)

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A Christmas miracle

Nothing happened

On Christmas Eve I received in the mail a card from my parents. To my astonishment, it wished me Season's Greetings. Since Mom & Dad have been inducted into the Bill O'Reilly school of obstreperous observation of “Merry Christmas or Else!”, this was an unprecedented departure. I have never before received a holiday card from my parents that was not overtly religious. It gave me pause.

A positive omen?

Having ascertained from Mom (I'm not speaking to Dad, after all) that dinner on Christmas day would get under way shortly after 11:00 a.m., I timed my arrival at the family homestead to a nicety, turning onto their county road at a quarter of. To my horror, however, not a single vehicle sat in front of their house. I was unmistakably the first to arrive. I considered looping around the block (that's a four-mile detour out in the country, where each block consists of 640 acres), but decided instead to take advantage of the opportunity to secure the pole position in the driveway for my later departure. I placed the car so that no one could block my escape. (It also meant that my Barbara Boxer and “No on 8” stickers were on prominent display.)

I entered the house. The tables were set up and the place settings laid out in the dining room, but the room was empty. Mom & Dad were in the family room, being (further) deafened by the television (tuned to Fox, of course). I cleverly entered the house with my hands full of gift bags for my various nieces, nephews, and grand-nephews. (No grand-nieces yet.) Mom grabbed me and hugged me anyway, but Dad had to wait till I had deposited the gift bags in the living room and then accosted me with an out-thrust hand. Interestingly, Mom chose that moment to give me another hug and got in his way. An accident, perhaps—or she feared I might snub him. But Dad tried again and I deigned to shake his hand. (Mom was right to be concerned. I hesitated a moment.)

The truce was now official.

I fetched a second batch of gift bags and fussed over grouping them according to recipient families for a while, killing a few minutes. I stepped outside to snap some photos of the dairy and, in the opposite direction, the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada, which were remarkably sharp and visible after the series of rainstorms. With the air in the valley having gotten rather bad, the mountains are usually obscured by a pervasive haze. When I was a kid back in the sixties, the Sierra was spectacular on a daily basis, so of course we hardly paid them any attention.

A nephew finally arrived with wife and son in tow. Then a niece and assorted grand-nephews. (My parents currently have five great-grandsons, some of them older than their youngest granddaughter.) The house began to fill up. All of my siblings eventually showed up, along with all of their spouses (save the one estranged wife) and all of their children and children-in-law. Even my godson from out of state was present, as well as one cousin who is my parents' godson. Twenty-nine people in all, which was not a record-breaking crowd by any means.

Still, my sister's grandson—an only child so far—was slightly overwhelmed. My sister tried to put the two-year-old at ease by identifying me and her other brothers to the little guy. “See? I have three brothers. See how lucky I am?”

“That's certainly not what you used to say,” I observed.

My grand-nephew was uncertain why my brothers and I were chuckling, but he took it as a good sign and broke into a grin. His parents have told him he'll have a little brother or sister by the end of spring.

Mom cut back (a little) on cooking this year because it's started to overwhelm her. Sensible move. Therefore she fixed only one turkey for Christmas—along with stuffing, potato salad, mashed potatoes, torresmos (fried pork), cranberry, and dinner rolls. One brother broiled a batch of steaks, my sister-in-law provided a shrimp salad, the cousin brought a ham, and my sister provided her weird but tasty orange Jell-O marshmallow-cheddar salad, plus pumpkin pies, cookies, and brownies for dessert. No one went hungry, although a vegetarian might have been a little overwhelmed. (I'm not aware that we currently have any in the family. It's an omnivorous group.)

In the aftermath, adults took turns keeping track of the hyperactive children (preventing things like cliff-diving off the piano in the living room, where two of the little ones were pounding out a random-key duet). A niece's spouse tried to talk sport vehicles with me (I asked him when in the seventies American Motors had taken over manufacturer of the Jeep from Willys—which established my street credit that I even knew it had occurred—and launched him on a happy discourse). Dad showed off his gargantuan project of digitizing old family photos and slides, which is supposed to result in a DVD album to distribute in the near future. (I'll need to turn down the sound: a loop of Mozart's “Eine Kleine Natchmusik” is sprightly and entertaining background music only the first twelve times you hear it.)

The party started to break up at 2:00, with people trickling away. I dug out a copy of my unpublished book and gave it to Mom, who seemed mildly surprised but did not react very much. I wondered if my sister had already spilled the beans to her about the book's existence. She said no, that Mom was still in holiday-overwhelmed mode and it would sink in later. When my sister got out the door, I also made my escape. No overnight stay for me this year. I told Mom good-bye and hit the road. Dad was otherwise occupied (probably back at his slide show) and I didn't seek him out. No point in tempting fate.

The trip home was accompanied by some rain, but nothing spectacular. It was a long day with several hours of road travel (scenic Highway 99!), but it was also a rather successful day.

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Ho, ho, hum

Oh, is it Xmas again?

The math department used to have a clerk for whom the holidays were irresistible opportunities to tart up the office with festive paraphernalia. I particularly remember a Christmas when wreathes and cut-outs and posters adorned the hallways and all of the office doors.

“Nice pixie you've got there,” I said to a colleague, admiring the colorful cut-out figure that bore an embarrassingly close resemblance to the aforementioned colleague. Short and baby-faced math professors have a rough way to go, let alone getting confused with elves and pixies. We speculated on whether the selection of the pixie figure had been deliberate or fortuitous*.

I escaped with a nondescript wreath, although I pushed it aside because it was obscuring the final exam schedule I had posted.

The current staff of the department is a little more restrained, for which I am grateful. Most of the decorations remain in the staff office and don't invade the faculty precincts. There are, of course, colleagues who put up their own decorations, but at least they don't put anything on my office door.

For some reason, I have not the slightest impulse to mark holidays with decorations or special outfits. I marvel at the people who have the time, patience, and inclination to festoon their homes with elaborate displays of holiday lights and animatronic Santas. It strikes me as peculiar, while I guess most people regard it as perfectly normal behavior.

No doubt I am the peculiar one.

This week I was perusing some books in a local independent store. One of the staff members there is an old classmate of mine. He was wearing a red and green holiday hat that looked like a flaccid dunce cap. I wanted to ask him if his boss made him wear it, but I restrained myself.

Some things I don't need to know.

Have a nice holiday, whether you dress up or not, and whether or not you have strobe lights in your front yard that are keeping the neighbors up at night. (I'll be the guy with the blanket pulled over his face.)

---

*My colleague even understood that “fortuitous” means “by chance” rather than “fortunate”—or at least it used to.

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Slave to fashion

Better than the comics

A plastic crate sits in one corner of my dining area, where newspapers get pitched into it every morning. The crate gets to gobble newspapers in two servings. First I strip the newspapers of their sports sections, classified ads, and sales inserts. I never look at those, so they get dumped immediately. The rest of the newspaper follows later, after I've had a chance to peruse my favorite sections.

The comics are also included. I like those. And the editorial and news pages. And, of course, the sections on style and fashion. You really can't beat the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle's style section for the latest word on what the fashion-conscious beautiful people will be wearing.

I'm not sure, however, exactly where these beautiful people are or when they will be wearing these new fashion creations. Not around here, apparently.

I don't flip through these sections for my own sake. You understand, I'm sure, that math professors are exempt from all of the rules of style and fashion. One of the beauties of the academic profession is that you can get away with just about anything, from ties to T-shirts. Hardly anyone cares or notices.

On the other hand, our students are mostly in the target age-demographic for the fashion shows reported by the Chronicle, but mine seem peculiarly immune to fashion-forward trends. I am fairly certain that none of them will be sporting Feng Chen Wang's outré offerings from a recent show at the San Francisco Arts of Fashion Foundation. Although the show was titled “Uniquely Untrendy,” I suspect they were being just a bit insincere. The results look plenty trendy to me.

Anyway, photos like this one are a good reason to refrain from tossing away the style section when I reduce my morning papers to their essentials. It's funnier than the comics section, even at the risk of snorting coffee out my nose every time I turn a page.

I just hope this young couple doesn't turn an ankle.

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Post hoc planning

Transfixed by time's arrow

My English teachers in high school were all clear on the importance of preparation. A good outline was the sine qua non of good writing. It provided the armature on which one could construct a solid, coherent, and well-organized essay. To drive home the point, most of the time they insisted that we students hand in our outlines together with our finished compositions. I could follow their reasoning, but I did not find it compelling enough for compliance.

As the wild and rebellious youth I was [pause for amusement of the LOL variety], I naturally preferred to dash off my papers at one go and then sketch out an outline, executing my instructions backward. My outlines were thus more like abstracts, and they certainly weren't planning tools. Since my assignments routinely came back with A's on them (and little notes of approbation and encouragement in the margins), I saw no reason to change my perverse practice.

A colleague inadvertently reminded me of this as we had lunch together at an Italian (or, rather, Italian-themed) restaurant near our college. She was an English professor who had been lured into management, but the composition instructor still lingered within her, lurking just below the surface. It emerged as we forked up our pasta and she asked a question about my novel.

“You know, Zee,” she said conversationally, “every work of composition is seeking to answer a question. What was the question you were trying to answer with your novel?”

Fortunately my mouth was full and it was impolite to answer immediately. I continued to chew in a genteel and ruminative fashion, taking the opportunity to compose a response. Since I obviously didn't have time to write an outline, I had to dash off something extemporaneously. It had, of course, never occurred to me before that I might have been asking a question. Nevertheless, my colleague was doing me the honor of treating me like a serious writer instead of as a madcap, slapdash chronicler of family lore, legend, rumor, and scandal. She deserved a considered answer.

Rather to my surprise, I realized that I had a good answer, and it was her question that had crystallized it in my mind. Since I talk nearly as much with my hands and with my voice, I put my fork down and spoke.

“No one has ever asked me that before,” I said. “I think, however, I was exploring the answers to two questions. On the one hand, I was writing about the forces that keep a large and contentious family together.” Suiting actions to words, I raised my right hand, facing the open palm to the left. “On the other, it was a question of what causes a family to fly apart.” My left hand mirrored my right, in opposition. “The centripetal force in our family—the binding energy—came from my grandmother. As the matriarch, she could pull us all into the neutral zone of her home, where feuds were not allowed and bickering was relegated to the deep background, out of sight. She was velvet-lined steel. Holiday gathering were conducted under a flag of truce.

“Once she was gone, however, all of the centrifugal forces came into play. My uncle felt free to set aside his wife and move in with his girlfriend. And my godfather tried to take advantage of the vacuum to seize control of part of the estate. The family shattered into contending factions, playing balance-of-power games with temporary alliances of convenience and a series of countervailing lawsuits. Those experiences provided the raw material for my novel, which is a fact-based work of fiction. I tried to sort out the motivations and make sense of the collapse and reconstruction of the extended family.”

I'm not sure that what I said actually came out as smoothly as I've rendered it here, although I've had teachers tell me that I talk the way I write (which is perhaps just a little scary—but I swear that I don't do air quotes or air parentheses). At the very least, however, what I said had the advantage of being true. Like an organism that had grown too large to survive in its ecological niche, my family fissioned into chunks that reorganized themselves into smaller and more stable versions of the original model. That's not a surprise when you think about it, is it?

The chunks have experienced a wide variety of fates. My godfather's proved unstable, breaking apart further and scattering across a great geographical expanse. My uncle's group—well, it was never even really his group. His divorce alienated both his spouse and their children. My father's chunk has been the most cohesive, perhaps because it was one of his sons, my kid brother, who pieced the family dairy farm back together and restored our reputation in the Central Valley agricultural community. That almost gives the story a happy ending, except that life and death go on. One doesn't write “The End” on the last page of a family story and expect it to mean very much.

My colleague nodded her head in satisfaction at my answer. I felt as if I had passed a test. At that moment, I realized that the questions were inherent in my writing project, even if I had not been consciously aware of them at the time. She had nudged me out of my own story and reminded me that I was my manuscript's omniscient observer. For an instant, it felt that I had figured out all of the answers to life's little questions as they were posed in the drama of my family—and rendered into a fictional story that I could tell to others. It was a pleasant illusion, but I will never really know what motivated some of the actions of the real people in my life, even if I think I succeeded in winding up the springs of their fictional counterparts and “explaining” their actions.

It's only a story.

And, as I noted a moment ago, real life continues beyond the pages of fictional life. My father lacks the diplomatic touch that his mother possessed in superabundant measure and he finds it difficult to deal with willful offspring (like yours truly). Too bad. It has led to our present estrangement and my absence from today's Thanksgiving dinner. (I find it difficult to break bread with someone who calls me a liar. I'm sort of sensitive that way.) Mom is naturally suffering from the collateral damage, so I've promised her I'll show up for Christmas. I'll pretend there's a flag of truce fluttering over the family farm.

I can do that much, at least. And perhaps I'll learn the answers to more questions that I don't know I have.

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It's elementary

The first samples are free

One assumes that both nature and nurture got in their licks in making me the man I am today, but one nurturer who knew how to punch nature's buttons was my sixth-grade teacher.

I attended an old-fashioned K-8 elementary school before going directly to a four-year high school. No traumatic middle-school experience for me! My elementary school had a rotation system for morning classes for sixth graders through eighth graders. We'd start out in our home room, where the sixth graders learned math from the sixth-grade teacher, the seventh graders learned English from the seventh-grade teacher, and the eighth graders learned science from the eighth-grade teacher. Then we'd rotate, all shifting from one classroom to another while the teachers stayed in place, teaching math, English, and science to their colleagues' students. One more rotation, and we students had all had our daily doses of math, English, and science.

I know what you're thinking. I told you that the sixth-grade teacher taught math, so that's what you're focused on, particularly since you know I grew up to be a math teacher. You think he inspired me to teach math.

I'm not at all sure that he did.

Sure, I was entertained when he mischievously wrote “commutative” on the chalkboard and told us its definition. It wasn't in our math syllabus at all, but he was studying up on New Math, which was soon to be introduced in our school. I remember being interested and intrigued, while I'm sure most of my classmates were thanking God that they would be the last to use the old textbooks rather than the first to use the new ones.

But this is not about New Math.

It's about Mr. Fischer's library. Perhaps he planted a mathematical seed or two while teaching me a subject that I absorbed with ease, but I remember him more for fostering my love of reading. His shelves were laden with an eclectic collection of books. He would read to the entire class right after the lunch hour, settling us down before the afternoon's lessons. (For a few of us, that turned into nap time.) I remember particularly his reading of a science fiction novel about three young men who get stranded on Mars, turning the book into a serial that we worked through over the course of a few weeks.

It was probably a good thing he chose to read that instead of his copy of The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. That title fascinated me, because the hefty tome was obviously not an outline. (The seventh-grade teacher had taught us to outline, but Wells had clearly not learned that lesson.)

To my eyes, however, the real treasure trove was a standalone bookcase placed against the east wall of the classroom. It wasn't a large bookcase, standing only three or four feet tall. Its shelves were filled with histories and biographies, all of them in volumes of matching size and format. I cannot remember which publisher had decided to repackage existing books or commission new ones to create a uniform collection of octavo-sized books, their cloth covers rendered in various muted colors (white, beige, pink, peach, baby blue, and pale green). There were dozens of them. Maybe fifty. Even sixty? (That would be four shelves of fifteen each, which strikes a memory chord. But I'm not sure.)

To my surprise, Mr. Fischer told me I could borrow his books and actually take them home. Once I started, I could not stop. I read about Thomas Jefferson, the French Revolution, Daniel Boone (who did not wear a coonskin cap!), Davy Crockett (who did), Lewis & Clark, Christopher Columbus, the Wright brothers, Simon Bolivar, and Joan of Arc, among many others.

I distinctly remember—in that peculiar way that memory captures random fragments of life—that I learned the word “coddle” while reading Joan of Arc. After being wounded by an arrow in the battle of Les Tourelles, Joan retired from the field and had the projectile removed. Then, “refusing to coddle herself,” she returned to lead the French forces to victory, dispiriting the English troops who had thought she might be dead. I went to look up “coddle” in the dictionary and thereafter had another word in my vocabulary that sixth graders were not expected to use.

Under the impulse of this memory, I recently spent some times in the stacks of a university library, sitting amidst the shelves of the Joan of Arc biographies (DC103 in the Library of Congress cataloging system), riffling through those published before 1960 to see if I could spot the word “coddle” in the chapter on Les Tourelles (just before the capture of Orléans). It was a quixotic effort and it failed. If I had found it, I would have searched for the publication history of that particular biography to see whether I could learn when it got into that set that belonged to Mr. Fischer. And perhaps learn the nature of that set itself.

It's just idle curiosity now, but it would amuse me to see the list of books in that collection. However many there were and whatever their subjects were, I read every one during sixth grade.

So many books! So little time.

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Based on a true story

A befuddled eyewitness account

Weird things happen sometimes. A year ago at this time I was immersed in a weird thing myself. You'd think I would have a clue why it occurred, but you'd be wrong. Perhaps it was like the pressure building up inside a containment vessel until at some point the vessel ruptures and the contents spew out in a sudden, uncontrolled pulse. Maybe it was like that.

Whatever the explanation, the result was that I spewed out 110,000 words of text in 20 days.

It was pretty awesome.

I have witnesses, too. They watched in bemusement as the pages poured out of my computer. One of my victims was my friend GW:

You've got a lot of nerve, Zeno, sending me pages from your upcoming novel, thereby totally knocking out a good half-hour of my day. How dare you!

I can see the family flames beginning to ignite.

Yeah, GW was instantly aware that I was writing a roman à clef based on my family's history. He started the guessing game. Was this particular character based on my grandfather or my uncle? Is this person based on your dad?

It was immediately obvious that the boy desperate to run away to college was me.

It seems like the character Paul might be playing your role in the story, being a puzzle and a weird mix of genes, and liking Wagner and books. Yeah, in a story about dairymen in Tulare county, that starts to sound like you.

Busted.

So tell me, did the real trial over your grandmother's will involve a handwriting “expert” and, if so, did you simply pull the dialog from the court transcript? I know, that would be cheating and unnecessary for Zeno, but it's so crisp and logical that it made me think, well, that you copied out of the transcript!

No transcript. It was all cobbled up from memory and make-believe, although it might have been nice to have a transcript for reference purposes.

You see, my family really did rend itself into warring camps when my grandmother died and deprived us of the great peace-making matriarch whose disapproving glance could turn the blood in our veins into ice water. We flew to flinders in the absence of the binding force of that formidable center.

That great cataclysm occurred nearly thirty years ago. Some family relationships were gradually repaired. Others never recovered. (My godfather and I never spoke another word to each other.)

Most of my family has yet to see the manuscript. I quietly shared it with my sister. She called me up to say she had had difficulty putting it down. “It brought back a lot of memories,” she said. Even though I wrote it as fiction, the outline of the story is faithful to our family disaster. My sister was also very concerned that I was going to stir up old resentments and spark recriminations. Her son perused the manuscript, but was less concerned:

“The good thing for you is that the characters who would be most insulted by an accurate depiction of what they really are like are dead, incompetent, or almost illiterate,” he said.

I can't imagine where my nephew got his sharp tongue. Such a rascal.

He's heard several of the family stories before. The weird and tragicomic anecdotes are staples at family gatherings. (Some of them have trickled onto this blog.) My sister would often comment after the nth retelling of a family fable, “Someone should really write these down, but it would have to be as fiction. No one could believe they actually happened in real life.”

Every time I heard her say that, I would think, I could do that. But I never did. At least, not until last year. That's when the stories that had been percolating through my brain for decades burst loose and spilled onto the pages of a book-length manuscript. In a way, I had been rehearsing the saga for all those years, so perhaps it's not so surprising how the episodes poured out at a rate of 5500 words per day.

I was rather stunned when it all came together like that, with the fictional mortar binding together the real-life incidents. Thanks to the comments of GW and a few other readers, I revised and expanded the manuscript in a more leisurely fashion over the subsequent months, reaching a “final” product last spring. It tilts the scale at nearly 125,000 words now and that's what is in the hands of a publisher's team of reviewers.

GW was pensive at the end of last August's exercise in prolixity:

Phew, so we're done? I actually read a whole book in a bit less than three weeks, must be some sort of record. I'm really glad I got to participate in this bit of madness. I enjoyed it for the reading, but also to see you crank this stuff out, day after day. I'd say Where does it come from, but we mere mortals don't really want to know.

I shared the manuscript with my college president, under the heading of “What I did during my summer vacation.” He was dutifully amused (one must give moral support to one's faculty members), but then—who saw that coming?—he read the whole damned thing. He sent me a message:

“I got goosebumps, a tug in my heart, and chuckled out loud with the close of your book.”

Damn. That's going in the cover blurb.

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Need-to-know basis

What they don't know won't hurt you

“How is your blood pressure?”

“It's fine, Dad,” I said. That seemed to be a better response than, “None of your business, old man.”

“So what is it?” he persisted.

“Like I said, it's fine. I don't carry my readings around with me.” It was in the 120s over the 80s, which is pretty fine, all right, but I was not in full disclosure mode. I should never have told him when I was diagnosed as hypertensive. Once you give him something like that, he'll never let go.

“Let's check,” he said.

I looked up. My father was brandishing his home blood-pressure kit, complete with inflatable cuff. He looked eager to spring into action. Instead of recoiling, I schooled myself to keep a neutral expression on my face.

“No, thanks, Dad.”

He looked disappointed, but not surprised. I never cooperate with his intrusive fact-finding missions.

It's one of the ways in which he and I are different. He delights in sharing gruesome details, occasionally spoiling meals. (“No, Dad, we don't need to know what they found when they lanced that boil. Please let us slurp our soup in peace.”)

Maybe it's one of those small-town things, where everyone knows everyone else's business. If it is, that's rather funny. Except for my grandparents, who lived next door, the nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away. We couldn't lean over our fences and gossip.

Or maybe we did. Except it was more a matter of leaning out the driver's window of your pickup for a few minutes to chat up an acquaintance who was working the field next to yours. Or shooting the breeze at the local coffee shop where the farmers take turns getting their morning infusions of caffeine.

In a sense, we did all live close together. It was like our yards were all part of the village commons, even though disaggregated and scattered in chunks throughout the county. At any time someone might park a pickup or tractor alongside your house, stroll over to the garden hose, and take a big drink or indulge in a cooling face splash. It would have been an exercise in excessive scrupulosity to knock on the door first to ask if it was okay. Of course it's okay. No question. We do the same at your place.

We also grew up in a drop-in culture. Calling ahead was entirely unnecessary. At completely random intervals, vehicles would pull into your driveway and aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and acquaintances might come tumbling out. If they knocked on your door and found no one home, it might be because you were pulling into their driveway at the same time. These things happen.

My unexamined acceptance of these practices underwent a complete collapse when I moved out to go to college. When I was still living close enough to home base to make drop-in visits feasible, I discovered how impossible it was to protest that tomorrow's real analysis exam prevented me from dropping everything and going out for a spontaneous but leisurely dinner with my family. Their faces would fall if I insisted that I merely planned to wolf down a sandwich while poring over measure theory. (It was I who was being rude by demanding or expecting prior notification.)

Fortunately, the problem was solved quite naturally once I was living over two hundred miles away. Impulse-driven drop-in visits became impossible and all was well. By then, however, I discovered that the process of individuation had produced someone unlike anyone else in the family.

I had become a private person, perhaps in a kind of weird rebellion from the well-established practices of kith and kin. I began to starve the information mill—or should I call it the “gossip machine”?

Part of it was to avoid arguments, I think. There was no benefit in sending certain bulletins home:

• “Hey, I'm a member of the ACLU now!”
• “Guess what? I stopped going to mass this spring.”
• “I gave Howard Jarvis a bad time during a Q&A in Sacramento.”
• “I went to Jimmy Carter's campaign rally at the capitol.”
• “I protested Jerry Falwell's appearance at a Moral Majority rally.”
•  “I spoke at an AIDS memorial service.”
• “I'm going back to grad school.”

That last instance is one of my more notable examples of keeping my mouth shut. After a dozen years of full-time teaching, I got itchy to return to grad school to earn a doctorate, not having stayed the course in my previous attempt. However, when I was admitted and began to take classes, I never told Mom and Dad. Instead, I'd occasionally comment to my parents about some seminar or another that I had attended at the local university. All very casual. I didn't report that I was formally enrolled.

It was a lesson learned from my bouts of high blood pressure and life under the microscope (or sphygmomanometer). Once my parents (especially Dad) were aware that I was taking another run at an advanced degree, I would be boxed in. Regular progress reports would be demanded (ever so nicely, of course). I'd be committed. Any decision to bow out would be viewed as a crisis or failure rather than a personal judgment that grad school had become too big a distraction or detour from my teaching career. Thus I didn't tell any tales out of school until I had completed the degree requirements and calmly informed Mom and Dad that the university had approved my dissertation and was awarding me a degree.

“We didn't know you were in school!”

“Oh, it was just a part-time thing. The units gradually added up. No big deal.”

Right.

My parents were quickly reconciled to the idea that I had puttered my way to an advanced degree. It was a new bragging point to share with their friends, so no harm done.

I imagine, though, that Mom and Dad have learned over the years that their eldest is a close-mouthed fellow who keeps his cards close to his vest. They're probably wondering what new revelation I might suddenly spring on them next. Have I secretly gotten married? (Fat chance.) Have I received some fancy political appointment? (No, they turned me down for the citizens' redistricting commission.) Have I pierced my ears? (Heck, no, although it would be funny. Poor Dad lost sleep when my kid brother did.) Have I endorsed another left-wing cause? (Oh, too many to tell!)

Nope, none of those things will be the next big surprise. The next big surprise is going to appear in book form. Only my sister won't be surprised, because she got to read the first draft. I have told my family's epic history in fictional form in a novel and a publisher is currently scrutinizing it. All the names have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent, although my sister has warned me I'm going to get into trouble anyway. I doubt it's going to be a problem. Besides, the characters based on Mom and Dad come out pretty well and are definitely not the bad guys.

Still, maybe I should consider what the surprise will do to Dad's blood pressure.

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